Professions Leveling: Enchanting 1 – 525

14Jan

Continuing on with th e Leveling Professions series, today I’m going to move on to what many consider to be one of the single-hardest professions to level – Enchanting

Enchanting is a great profession, providing you with some of the most beneficial perks of any profession both while you’re leveling and when you’re nearing end game content as well. It’s also one of those great professions that every class and spec can benefit from as well.

Just a reminder, the purpose of these guides isn’t to actually tell you what to make, because you can already find that at the same source I go to when it’s time to level professions: WoW-Professions.com. You can click on this link to find their Enchanting Leveling Guide.

Instead, I’m going to go through the leveling guide and give you the information that you don’t find at WoW-Professions. Things such as bottlenecks in crafting or materials, how I personally go about leveling them (where I deviate from their guides), and some things I like or dislike about the profession. I’ll also give a few tips on how I make gold with the profession, or ways that I might put it to use that aren’t apparent to everyone.

Getting Started: Materials
The first thing you need to know about Enchanting is what type of materials you need to craft. Enchanting is its own material source. Almost everything that you do as an Enchanting requires you to get mats from other magical items by destroying them with your Disenchant ability (which you get automatically for picking the Enchanting profession).

A good profession to pair up with Enchanting is basically any other crafting profession, though the typical pairing is Tailoring because it too does not require a separate gathering profession to fuel its crafting. But really any crafting profession can be of use. Early on Tailoring is definitely your best source, basically all the way through Outlands. Once you get into Northrend and Cataclysm crafting your best companion profession actually becomes Jewelcrafting and to a somewhat lesser extent, Blacksmithing. Though both of those require you to have a source of ore to craft the items that you’ll disenchant for your enchanting materials.

If you’re looking to power-level the profession you can scroll down to the bottom of this post to find a list of items you want to gather beforehand. If you’re looking to purchase all of the items you need to power-level the profession then you’ll need to be prepared to spend anywhere from 4-12,000g as mats for Enchanting vary widely based on server.

Trouble Areas
Almost every profession has some sort of bottleneck, or trouble area where the mats are either hard to find or all of the recipes you have access to are either green or yellow and so only have a chance to skill you up. Enchanting is no exception to this and random numbers being what they are I actually tend to have worse luck with Enchanting than any other profession in this regard.

As for particular mats that I’ve found through my own experience or from guild members as being trouble areas or bottlenecks, here are the top ones to be prepared for: Lesser Nether Essence/Greater Nether Essence, and Lesser Eternal Essence/Greater Eternal Essence. The good news is all of these are Vanilla mats, so they shouldn’t be too hard to find right now since we’re still early in a new expansion and there will be a lot of people leveling new toons.

Lesser/Greater Nether Essence always turns out to be one of the bottlenecks that I hear from other people. The reason is that you only have a good chance of getting these essences from weapons that require level 41-49 to use and the 40’s is where gear really starts to ramp up for Vanilla content and where people start to level quicker as they push for Outlands. Armor always seems to drop more often than Weapons do because there are so many more armor slots than weapon slots, but Weapons have higher Essence drop rates and Armor has a higher Dust drop rate. Nether Essences are also used in a number of twink enchants so enchanters are more likely to keep them for their own use than they are to sell them on the AH.

Lesser/Greater Eternal Essence has the exact same problem as the Nether essence, but it’s an even worse problem. The reason here is that Eternal Essences come from weapons in the level 50-59 range. The increased problem comes from the fact that so many people leave for Outlands the second they hit level 58 so there are two levels worth of content that is rarely farmed for enchanting mats, and people are looking for upgrades for the newer content more so than looking to profit from the mats. While Eternal Essences are also used for twink enchants you can often find them easier and at lower prices than the Nether Essences.

Outlands, Nothrend, and Cataclysm all did Enchanters a favor because they only have one set of each type of Enchanting material. Outlands uses Arcane Dust, Lesser/Greater Planar Essence, Small/Large Prismatic Shards, and Nexus Crystals. Northrend has a similar setup with Infinite Dust, Lesser/Greater Cosmic Essence, Small/(normal) Dream Shards, and Abyss Crystals. Cataclysm also follows that patten with Hypnotic Dust, Lesser/Greater Celesial Essence, Small/(normal) Heavenly Shards, and Maelstrom Crystals.

With Vanilla covering 60 levels worth of content instead of just 5-10 there are 5 different types of Dusts and Essences.

Enchanter’s Special: Rods
There’s one other thing you need to know about Enchanting in particular and that is that we rely entirely on another profession to profess our out, not for mats, but for tools. In order to progress your skill and make higher level enchants you need to craft various Rods as you go. These Rods are made by Blacksmiths and Blacksmiths alone, so if you don’t have access to one of your own or someone in your guild then you’re going to have to hunt one down in chat or search for them on the AH. The rods themselves are just a material that you’ll then use to create “enchanting” rods.

You’ll want to get the mats for all of these rods well before you start your crafting or else you might very well find yourself stuck and searching for mats that aren’t always easy to find. So here’s a list of each of the rods, where to get them, what mats you need to craft them, and where to find any special mats or recipes you’ll need for your rod crafting as well.

While the Heavenly Shards required for the final rod aren’t really “special” mats, they are currently fairly expensive this early in the expansion. You get the shards from disenchanting Cataclysm level Rare (blue quality) items. These blue items will disenchant into either Small Heavenly Shards or normal Heavenly Shards, and you can right-click a stack of 3+ Small Heavenly Shards to turn three of them into a single Heavenly Shard. There aren’t a whole lot of blue quality quest rewards out there so you’re best bet is to craft them yourself or buy them on the Auction House.

The easiest way to get the pattern for the Runed Arcanite Rod is to roll a Druid alt if you don’t already have one, and get them to level 15 where they’ll learn the spell Teleport: Moonglade. The recipe is limited supply and only sells in a quantity of 1, but it has a decent spawn rate so you shouldn’t have to wait very long if it’s not available when you get there. This recipe also sells very well for 18-35g on most servers I’ve been to.

The Runed Adamantite Rod has an unlimited quantity and can be most easily purchased by going through the portal in any major faction city to the Dark Portal and then flying from there to your location. Unlimited quantity means it’s easy for you to purchase several copies of it to sell some of them on the AH for 20-35g each.

You cannot skip any Rods while you are leveling up. You have to move from one rod to the next and each new rod uses the previous level’s rod as one of the mats to craft it. Each higher level rod counts as all of the lower level rods, but you have to have each of the lowers to craft the highers, though only one of each. Everyone always asks me if they can just make the higher level rods or if they can be crafted for them, but you cannot as each “Runed” version of the rod binds immediately when you craft it.

The only good thing about the Rods being this way really is that you can make some decent profit selling the recipes for those two rods on the AH. Otherwise it’s really quite a drawback if you can’t find the base rods that Blacksmiths craft on the AH and you don’t know any either.

Notable Special Recipes
These special recipes are ones that you want to try to purchase beforehand if you can to make your leveling easier. There are a lot of them, so I’ll just list them all below.

The only recipe that you have to purchase with the enchanter themselves is the last one on the list there because it’s purchased from the Shard Vendor and is Bind on Pickup (BoP). The rest you can buy from vendors or on the AH with any character.

Because these recipes are used for power-leveling the profession they’re also good recipes for you to pick up when you’re in the area that the vendors happen to be in if you want to list them on the AH for a decent profit.

Specializations
Just kidding, Enchanting doesn’t have a specialization.

However, you will occasionally find Enchanters (like me) who personally “specialize” in a particular type of enchant. For example, I specialize in twink enchants and make a special effort to hunt down or grind any and every enchant I can find that is used for twinking. I have found other people who “specialize” in other enchants such as ones with cool graphic effects or ones for specific classes. They know exactly what kind of visual effect each of their enchants can give so if you’re on a RP server or just want to have a specific look at your character with a weapon with a purple glow (for example) on it, then these are the enchanters you want to seek out.

The ones who specialize in classes are people who don’t like to “waste” gold learning patterns from the trainer that they will never use (Melee classes not buying Intellect enchants for example); while they probably don’t have anything special to offer over another enchanter, they generally have great advice on which enchants to buy and which to not waste your time on if it’s related to their “spec”.

Since there’s not an actual specialization for enchanting you’re not going to find people that do this everywhere you go, but it never hurts to ask if you’re looking for something in particular.

Psynister Preferences
Enchanting is one of my favorite professions, and any time I move to a new server and actually establish myself there my first main character is always an Enchanter. I’ll have other toons who have gathering professions, but the first real focus on crafting is Enchanting. I like to make myself more powerful whenever I can by utilizing enchants, so I don’t like to stay anywhere without access to enchants. I’m a min/maxer, and Enchanting is the best min/max profession in the game.

As far as making money off of Enchanting goes, your best bet is to make frequent use of Enchanting Vellums. These items can be purchased from any enchanting supplies vendor in the game for 10 silver each, or they can be crafted by Inscriptionists as well (I suggest you just buy them). I don’t suggest you use them for your initial enchants, the ones you use to get up to skill level 100 or so because you’re not very likely to get your money back them. Instead just enchant your own gear, gear from people you group with in random dungeons, guild members’ gear, or just random white gear that you can buy or cheap stuff off of the AH.

If you’re teaming up with Tailoring then I suggest you use the gear you craft to disenchant as your enchanting targets before you DE it. If you have 15 cloak enchants and 15 cloaks you’re about to DE then just go down your inventory and enchant one then DE it, enchant the next and DE it, and so on down the line.

Once you’ve gotten above 100 or so in your skill go ahead and use the Enchanting Vellums instead so that you can sell your enchants on the AH or use them on your alts if you’re an altoholic like myself. You may also consider putting them on white gear to use as Hand Me Downs (HMD Directory) if you haven’t heard of my practice of making them and would like to try it out for yourself.

Two of the enchants listed on the leveling guide at WoW-Professions that are particularly good at making some extra money are Enchant Bracer – Greater Intellect and Enchant Shield – Greater Stamina. Both of these are used by twinks and sell well on the AH. I suggest you don’t list more than 3-5 of them at a time to prevent undercutting, but I sell the Shield enchant for 12-15g and the Bracer enchant for 15-25g.

There are a couple of other enchants that are “Enchant ??? – Greater Stamina” as well, which also use 5x Dream Dust just like that Shield enchant. Both of these are twink enchants too and they usually sell for 8-12g each. Dream Dust is one of the cheaper mats to find because it’s found early enough in the leveling process that people who are trying out new toons will often find a lot of it while running dungeons before they decide whether or not they want to keep the character.

For several months at the end of Wrath I was buying stacks of Dream Dust for less than 2g and then turning that stack into four Greater Stamina scrolls that sold for 15g each. After several months someone decided to put an end to it by buying all of the Dream Dust and relisting it for over 80g a stack, but by that time I was already so tired of crafting and listing them that I really didn’t care and just left the market alone until it all went back to normal.

The enchants from Burning Crusade will sell at a decent rate too, though most of the ones that bring any real gold in are drops from special tBC dungeons and raids. Northrend enchants are selling very well right now since people are using those on their new Cataclysm gear instead of investing in Cataclysm enchants, so be sure to put all of your Northrend enchants on vellums to sell on the AH.

Cataclysm enchants right now are mostly selling for crap. Put them on scrolls but take a look at their AH price before you list them. If they’re ridiculously cheaper than the mats it takes to make the enchant then just hold onto them for now in your bank and sell them in a few months when they’re actually worth something. If you sell them now then you risk missing out on more gold at a later date, though if you wait then you do risk the possibility that they’ll drop even lower in price later on.

Nobody can predict what the future holds for your server’s economy, but personally I’ve got all of my scrolls stashed on a bank alt ready to be listed when the market clears up a bit from all the people leveling their profession right now

Power Leveling Materials List
The following list is taken from the WoW-Professions website. To find a list of what to make with these items you’ll need to refer to their Enchanting Leveling Guide.

This list includes the mats you need to craft all of the Rods as well.

7 responses to “Professions Leveling: Enchanting 1 – 525”

Great article! How I wish enchanting vellums existed back when I first started with my baby enchanter!

I, for one, still find enchanting slightly confusing – the number of catagories to search through, the level requirements, the slightly obscure mats… I’ll need to start leveling my own enchanters again so I can get a better feeling for the profession (instead of just throwing my gear at my husband and saying ‘MAKE IT BETTER WITH ENCHANTS PLOX’).

Curses, I do that all the time. I need to start running some searches on these series posts.

I really wish they would break Enchanting down so that it was a bit find things at a glance. The new search feature built into the professions window is a big help, though.

The number of mats really can get out of hand though. I’m now up to four 36 slot enchanting bags and a 32 slot, and I’m about to overflow all of them after I disenchant the jewelry that didn’t sell today from leveling my alt’s JC. It doesn’t matter how much I try to sell, I always end up running out of space again within a week.

Another neat thing about the search feature in the professions window though – you can now search by the stat that they give as well. So if you know your toon needs Agility then just search for Agility and it will bring up every enchant that has anything at all to do with Agility. Same goes for every other stat. You can also do the search by materials if you know you have a lot Hypnotic Dust for example you can search for all enchants that use that mat.

Enchanting them has no impact on what items the disenchant yields, I do it simply to save myself button presses when leveling the enchanting because I can get points enchanting non-enchanted gear rather than enchanting the same piece(s) over and over and having to click to confirm overriding the current enchant. In the long run it simply saves you a small amount of time.

If you’re not going to skill up on the enchants that you would use to enchant the gear, then don’t bother as it’s simply a waste of mats.